Saturday, June 12, 2010

As I stated a few days ago, a mysterious fellow by the name of Kirk wrote today's post. And he did, and you can read it below. BUT FIRST, i have something important to say.

More than four years ago, Achewood began perhaps its most famous story arc, The Great Outdoor Fight, with a mostly unrelated plot: Todd, the crack addict squirrel, goes to Ray Smuckles, millionaire party dude, with an idea for a company. They go into business making, and I quote, "fake nuts for your cell phone." This was, I want to note, about one year before the iphone was even announced.

Flash forward to today. someone has gone and invented this product, for real. check it out yourself. Especially compare the photo from the story with the drawing in the comic. I find this fact entirely wonderful.

I must admit, I do not envy Carl’s position as the lone watchman of xkcdsucks. It is hard for me to think up of ways to discuss why each comic sucks when they all are comprised of the same five or so terrible qualities. If I had to have a blog about how a single webcomic sucks in every update, I’d much rather choose Ctrl Alt Del for its comic incompetence and its underlying ego, or Questionable Content, for its middle school level drama, and its obsession with socially inept women, or VG Cats, so all I would have to do is be at out one angry post every season or so, or perhaps Sarah Zero because uggggggghhhhhfucckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk

Nevertheless, here we have a new xkcd with a cavalcade of popular xkcd features: stilted inhuman dialog, uninspired art,a Twister reference, some bullshit seize the day message, lezbeans! a retarded fanbase, oh and a lack of sense or a punchline. You know, the normal boring stuff.

For all the big deal some idiots made over the cast of this comic being completely female, I honestly couldn’t tell, as I was sure that the comic was populated by soulless automatons. This impression may be caused by some of the worst dialog I have seen in my short life. The main problem is that Randall forgot to vary his sentences at all. So out of the 5½ lines of the comic are declarative statements starting with I: “I’m afraid of snakes” “I’m afraid of saying…” “I want to be a storm chaser”. Use your connecting words, Randall! It does not take that good an editor to fix this, either. Hell, you could even go the Samuel L. Jackson route and just add curses (“Fuck that, I wanna be a motherfucking storm chaser”) Anything would be an improvement.

What art? (Ok the last panel was barely decent, but it is only going to be replaced by goatse in my heart) [before you click that link, you DO know what it is, right? --Carl]

Hey, did you know that Randall loved the movie Twister, it’s true! Me, I thought the movie was the definition of average, with annoying characters, a predictable plot and a tacked on love story. But this is Randall we are talking about. I mean, Garfield got him into writing comics, supposedly. Not even Garfield without Garfield, just plain old Garfield.

This one I don’t understand, why does Randall constantly harp on this seize the day message? Is he projecting his own fears onto the characters, or does he honestly believe that it is helpful advice? If he himself wants to go out and live a wild life, he should just go ahead and fucking do it. He has a job that requires 15 minutes of work and can be done from any location. Seriously, perhaps he went out and lived the life he wished to live, then we would have to see comics like this or that one when he complained about 10th grade not being very useful to his life. On the other hand, if Randall honestly believes this is useful advice that can enlighten his readers then he can take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, he can take a flying fuck at the mooooooooooooooon.

So apparently some people in the comments have mentioned that the xkcd forumites are assuming that the two girls are lesbians! This is why we can’t have nice things. Here you have a rare comic that satisfies the Bechdel test, and the fans try to somehow add in a romance themselves. Fuck them, fuck the internet and fuck our culture’s fetishism of lesbians. Fuck.

If you haven’t noticed, I haven’t discussed much about the comic itself, mainly because I believe that it is fairly evident how awkward the flow is, how random the plot is, and how dumb the alt text is. You can see that for yourselves, I’m not here to hold your hands, children.

Kirk out.

========================

Carl again: Guys, I wanted to just point out the one detail of this comic I hated, besides the fact that it had the same preachy "let me tell you how to live your life" tone of this comic and also this one and also this one, is the randomness of the dialog in panel two. If she were in any way a decent person, she wouldn't use her friends fear of snakes to jump in with "WELL YEAH? I AM AFRAID LIFE WILL BE BORING" which is, clearly, not even at all the same sort of feeling that the first girl is experiencing. Second girl just wants to tell everyone her ideas as much as possible.

while i agree that xkcd sucks in, like, a million and one ways, i don't actually have much of a problem with the "seize the day" message.if nothing else, it's more interesting then when they just stand around and talk.

The first panel's really badly written. Characterisation is utterly dependent on what the stick figures say (cos, y'know, art-wise? They're bloody stick figures).So Randy's failure to understand the basics of writing is just dismal.

Because look at the comic: those two people are just boring flat interchangeable nothings. And why? It's all in panel 1.

Here's my fix. Still a shitty comic, but at least the stick figures are not such obvious vehicles for the author's condescending dumbassery.Who's making you throw up with a cloying idiotic sentiment in xkcd's comic? Randy, the creator.Who's making you throw up in my edit? That idiot brunette.BIG IMPROVEMENT! :D

My problem with Randall's constant seize the day messages is that it sets up these false expectations that life is amazing and wonderful if you just stop your daily routine. That whole "let's have an ADVENTURE!" thing he does might make some depressed, bored soul think that he has been doing things wrong all his life, and that he would have a fulfilling life filled with excitement if he just looked out of that office window and rapelled down with adventure girl into the great unknown, whereas the truth is that life outside of that office window is just as boring as inside it.

I remember a discussion about this on the forum a while ago, where someone asked "so if I stormed out the door and found myself outside, what then? I already know what's out there." and the best 'adventurous' things the forumites could come up with was stuff like "change the route you usually take to walk your dog" or "have different coffee in the morning every once in a while".

Truth is, unless you're Indiana Jones, life really isn't all that filled with everyday amazement and wonder and every hour isn't a spectacular adventure to be enjoyed. But Randall keeps hitting people over the head with that same tired, false message, even to the point of some half-assed desert island analogy.

Yeah, thassa good point Fred. If your life sucks it's not because your situation sucks. It's because you suck.

I've taken crazy life-changing risks, I can attest to the truth. What happens is:- You change everything all around, skipping the country or quitting your job or ditching your loser friends in favour of The Dream.- You ride a rush of awesome feeling for...at very most a month, before realising The Dream is just more of life, so now what?- You go through intense periods of self-reflection and introspection, and come out of it a better person who'd be glad to embrace the old "shitty" life you once felt so compelled to escape.

I recommend doing it, but not at all for the reasons these comics recommend it.

Oh my god. This one made me so angry. Just that one line, totally out of the blue. "I want to be a storm chaser." A quivering heap of heavily seasoned rage marinated by the even worse setup that's the previous line "Do you - ". I don't know why this makes me so angry. Argh.

I kinda liked 753. Sure, it's an entry for the picto-blog (or in this case, picto-twitter) but at least it doesn't feature any of the following:- sex- white knighting- bad dialogue- shitty art- trite 'seize the day' messages- google results passed off as a joke- excessive nerd-pandering

The "seize the day" stuff has it's place, but it's like a punch in the face. Sure, it may be exhilarating the first time, and may even be helpful if you're feeling drowsy, but a simple slap will do, and it gets old real fast.

JFK didn't misspeak or make a mistake. Global South is a standard name for that region: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_SouthJFK was just paraphrasing when he said the southern half of the globe. If you actually look at the map, Latin America is south of the US and Canada, the Middle East and Africa are south of Europe, and most of Asia is south of the Asian part of the Soviet Union. Randall was just being ridiculously literal and ignorant of standard geopolitical speech of that era and thus wrong once again.

752 was an enigma to me until I read this post and saw the connection between the two first panels ("I'm afraid of x", "I'm afraid of y"). I'll have to agree that girl-with-black-hair is a bit of a jerk.

I would buy the claim that they're supposed to be lesbians. Not because I want to fetishize lesbianism or deny the viability of non-sexual girl-girl friendships, but because I know that Randall is a sexist retard with an overly dirty mind.

In fact, I think the "do you-" in the third panel is probably supposed to be some joke on their possible lesbianism. Plus, fear of snakes, I dunno, sort of Freudian in a "I just read about Freud on wikipedia" sort of way.

P.S. I'd never read Sarah Zero before, and holy shit, it sucks ass. You know how 90% of xkcd comics feel like they were made explicitly so they could be sold on t-shirts? Sarah Zero feels like that, but for desktop backgrounds. Only worse. Fuck, it is awful.

I can't believe people are passing off 753 as average. It's down there with the worst tripe Randall's ever put out, and that's saying something. It's the only XKCD comic to make me actually angry.

Does Randypants really think it's witty to point out such a tiny, inconsequential flaw in a political speech 50 years after it happened? How is this in any way funny, interesting, enlightening, or hell, even a comic?

So at around 11:45 on Sunday night, I guess Randall was flipping through a book of speeches.

Seriously, of all the statements of all the presidents over the years, was this the one that was highest priority? There are some seriously damaging canards out there that resulted from presidential speeches, but Randall has to go and pedantically correct a 49 year old statement made by a man who has been dead for 43 years.

"About the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North-South_divide - I don't think it makes the joke any less funny. A joke doesn't have to always offer an in-depth analysis of everything. Heck, many good jokes are built on ignoring well-known and obvious facts."

753 is pretty awful. I study Political Science; maybe Randall is just interested in getting in some cheap shots to a field that isn't "science" and has the word "science" in the name, but he could have at least looked up the North-South Divide. It doesn't take a huge leap to get from what JFK said to that. It takes, if anything, a small step.

Today, I guess, Mr. Munroe needed to point out to people that a politician got something WRONG. Even if said politician did not, in fact, get that something WRONG, it at least looks WRONG out of context, and therefore we can feel superior to said politician because he is WRONG, and we are right. Hooray for being right!

I assume the joke was supposed to be, "JFK didn't own a globe guys, WTF." If this is so, it wasn't funny. This comic goes straight into picto-blog territory.

Captcha: cookinse, as in, I'm going get me some cookinse for dinner tonight.

What is Randall trying to do anyway? He's a advocate of "nerd culture", but he pretty much epitomizes the worst stereotypes of nerds. Everyday speech is full of scientific/factual inaccuracies, but you've got to be completely socially inept to think everybody needs to hear about why it is inaccurate.

I like to think that this is all happening inside Salma Hayek's mind. Blond girl represents her fear of snakes, while black-haired girl symbolizes how dissatisfied she is with her choice of films. As a result, she is trying to get cast in a remake of Twister, preferably without any snake co-stars.

Haha, yeah! I guess the fact that their culture, origin and language is almost uniform across the Arabian peninsula and North Africa is pretty superficial. Why are people so goddamn lazy? Why does the Arab League (that notorious instrument of TEH MAINSTEEAM MEDIAS!) perpetuate the myth that the Middle East and North Africa are in any way similar?

The latest comic reminds me of smug douchebags in my social classes. The difference was that they didn't point out things like this because they got it, they would be smug about how the intent of speech was something diabolical or there were ulterior motives or blah blah blah I ARE SMARTER THAN A POLITICIAN THAT WILL BE MORE FAMOUS THAN ME NO MATTER HOW I TRY.

On the other hand, it's not that my teacher didn't mind this but if someone did something like what Randall just did for 753 and was acting smug about it, my teacher would've hit them (he was retiring that year, what would they do? FIRE HIM?!) and then would've told them how fucking retarded that statement was.

Long story short, Randall stop trying to talk about politics when you obviously don't understand them, or anything mass media/propaganda related

Hahaha, oh Randall, you're such a card. ...Not the actual Randall, the one above me.

I like the 753 "tool tip" [fuck the elitist alt-/title-text championing nerd-whores] better than the actual comic. I wish he'd illustrated those instead of his ignorant pseudo-geographical joke...

Even 49 years late, three panels of respectively Blowing up the Moon, Sending Cloned Dinosaurs into Space, and Constructing a Penis-shaped Obelisk on Mars all finally captioned as a whole with a JFK speech would be pretty hilarious, even if the artwork was sub-par. ...Well, as long as it wasn't too sub-par. Hmm.

Captcha: Swaties. What I'd call a couple of indentical Polish towns? I dunno, I'm not the one who makes a living [?] trying [?] to sell jokes.

Note: I stuck to XKCD criteria, namely that I had to do it B&W [[Mars would've been better in Red, obviously]], couldn't commit too much time to it, and primarily that I couldn't edit myself even if it turned out to be quite unfunny -- the people must hear, damn it!

This comic made me laugh out loud. Not because of any joke he attempted to make, but because of the idea of him being filled with righteous fury about someone being (not)wrong 50 years ago. Hey, remember that comic he made not too long ago about the guy who stalked the other guy over misuse of the word literally? This is like that, but 50 years worse, and is based on misunderstanding the original speaker.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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When he's not flipping a shit over prescriptivist and descriptivist uses of language, xkcdsucks' very own Rob likes writing long blocks of text about specific subjects. Here are some of his excellent refutations of common responses to this site. Think of them as a sort of in-depth FAQ, for people inclined to disagree with this site.